Generally those small Japanese cars are pretty reliable. They are, as you mentioned, cheap to insure and easy to maintain. Hybrid cars don't exactly benefit if you do more highway driving than city driving. I don't have any personal experience with Korean cars, they must have improved by a lot over the last few years. If you consider Prius C, why not Yaris? It does the same or better on gas mileage especially when you consider a lot of highway driving.